[In the following essay, Slonim discusses Prishvin's treatment of nature in his works.]

The main slogan of the industrial revolution promoted in Russia by the Communists was "the conquest of nature by man." The Party, repeating the statement of Bazarov, the nihilist hero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, that "nature is not a temple but a workshop, and man is a toiler in it," hailed the struggle against elemental forces, and saw mankind's historical aim as changing and shaping the face of the created world according to the rational designs of organized human beings. In an agricultural country such an ideology was bound to generate many contradictions. The conquerors of nature were linked to nature by a thousand bonds, they loved it and often felt that true happiness could be found only in its motherly womb. Though they built cities and power stations, harnessed rivers and bored through mountains, they frequently wondered whether supreme wisdom was not hidden in the serenity of the sky and the silence of the forest.

This contradiction was directly or obliquely reflected in fiction, and it explains the survival of a Rousseau-Tolstoy-back-to-nature trend in Soviet literature—even though such a tendency was condemned by official ideology. In the 'twenties and 'thirties its strength was proven by the growing popularity of Mikhail Prishvin. Acknowledged by Gorky as a first-rate writer, Prishvin was loved by millions of readers, and Communist critics had to make dialectical somersaults in order to explain why this "investigator of nature" was overshadowing the laudators of the Five-Year Plan and the social realists.

Prishvin was born in 1873 into a family of rich merchants. His father owned the estate Khrushchevo, near Elets, in Oryol province, and Mikhail's childhood was similar to that of the noblemen of Central Russia. His father died when he was 7. A few years later, while a student in Elets gymnasium he "escaped to America," but was duly caught and brought home. He had the typical upbringing of a radical intellectual, and since his family was connected with Populists, Mikhail became involved in revolutionary circles, was arrested, and subsequently went to Germany to finish his education. An agronomist by profession, he was an ethnographer, a folklorist, and a hunter by avocation, and began to write by the turn of the century. He wandered all over Russia, particularly in the north, with his rifle and notebook, listening "to the voice of forest, rock and water," talking to old peasants and young huntsmen, and gathering a tremendous amount of first-hand information about birds, beasts, plants, and human beings. Although his first books, such as In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907) and The Little Round Loaf (1908), which won him an award from the Geographical Society, were appreciated by nature lovers, he did not acquire a general public until after the Revolution, and he did not emerge as a mature and original artist until the 1920s. He was 50 when he began to play an important role in Soviet letters. His collections of tales, such as The Springs of Berendey (1925), and his vast autobiographical novel The Chain of Kashchey, serialized between 1923 and 1929 and published in book form in 1930, made him widely known, and his popularity kept growing. Other books, such as Crane's Birthplace, The Calendar of Nature, Root of Life—Ginseng (1932), Forest Drip-Drop (1940), The Larder of the Sun (1943), have been reprinted countless times.

Prishvin's work has a strong personal note: a wanderer and a sportsman, he wrote masterly sketches about nature which can be linked only with Aksakov's classic Notes of a Rifle Hunter (1852). "I do not know any other Russian writer," said Gorky, "in whom the knowledge and the love of the earth are so harmoniously united." For authors like Turgenev or Bunin nature is either a background or a frame and is conceived as a force hostile to man, but for Prishvin it is the main theme, and man's communion with it brings him wisdom and happiness. To him there is no rift between the "thinking reed" and the rest of the world; in contrast to Tiutchev, he affirms that man swims in the great cosmic stream, and that the life of the individual fits perfectly into the universal order of things. He speaks of animals, seasons, and men as equal manifestations of one and the same vital essence, but his outlook has no mystical vagueness, and his pantheism is free from overgeneralization. With the precision of a naturalist he gives the results of his observations; he has a horror of shallow talk about "the beauty of nature or the miracles of the creation," preferring to describe the exact coloring of a heathcock during mating time or the activity of bees on a summer day (Honey from Beyond the Pale, 1951). What makes the writing of this poet-scientist so captivating is his genuine love for everything that exists. He is forever making discoveries, and the thrill he feels in seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting, touching and thinking is infectious—it fills the reader with the joy of being alive and of detecting something new every moment. Fundamentally he is a moralist and a philosophical lyricist, and he talks of life with serenity and extraordinary insight. His own statement—"like autumn leaves, words of wisdom fall effortlessly"—can be fully applied to his writing. The wisdom of Prishvin derives from his "endless joy of constant discovery": beneath the phenomenal world he sees a "second world" of harmony and beauty, and his fiction becomes a poetization of nature. When readers and critics spoke of Prishvin's "spell and witchcraft," they actually meant his capacity to transform externals into meaningful images and to extract inner order from the diversity of impressions.

Gorky said to Prishvin: "You are a man's friend." And it is true that Prishvin's humanism is wholesome and simple, and devoid of sentimentality or sophistication. He has a delightful sense of humor and often chuckles over human foibles—the ridiculous grimaces of vanity and stupidity; the pretentious posturing of Homo sapiens are to him as funny as the caperings of monkeys. His approach, nevertheless, is not a purely biological one: he always looks for man's idealistic aspirations and tries to reveal in every individual that creative streak which, in his opinion, is "the essential thing in life." What is most important in man, he said, is the dream everyone keeps in his heart—be it the dream of a wood-cutter, a shoemaker, a hunter, or a famous scientist. In his peculiar and symbolic manner Prishvin gives the name of Berendey to those who are aware of this quality in themselves and have therefore found their own path and their own philosophy; most of them are doers and creators, from the simple peasants who display the wisdom of the earth and possess an infallible instinct of life, to artists and builders for whom every instant is a stimulus to creativeness. Those who search for the miraculous Ginseng or Gen Shen, the Chinese root of life which resembles the mandragora of the Renaissance, believe that this rare plant is a universal panacea; so does Louven, the hero of Prishvin's beautiful tale Root of Life. But their striving acquires a highly symbolic meaning, since men yearn for plenitude of being and for liberation from all the entanglements caused by social aberrations and false values.

This use of symbolism is Prishvin's usual device: his subject matter is strictly realistic and he is a student of concrete facts; but observation and inquiry lead him to general concepts and symbols that explain and hint at the secret order of the universe. As a writer he is akin to neorealists like Remizov or Zamyatin, who absorbed and transformed in their work the heritage of Russian symbolism. What differentiates him from Remizov, however, is that his vocabulary is more simple, his sentence structure clearer, his syntax more condensed. One of the best postrevolutionary stylists, he declared that a good writer "has to use terms that are absolutely necessary and to compress words into units endowed with physical force." In fact his writing has a surprising quality of solidity. His prose is rhythmic and smooth, drawing from the sources of popular speech. He often makes use of miniatures that form some sort of literary mosaic, and his main themes are disclosed through metaphors which compare human feelings and social events with animal behavior. His images derive from a kind of animism that pervades his descriptions of seasons, plants, rocks, and rivers. It is more than anthropomorphism—he humanizes natural phenomena, but man in his work always belongs to the universal whole.

Although many Soviet writers learned a great deal from this "pagan rationalist," he refused to be considered a teacher. "It is useless to ask a writer about the mysteries of his creativeness," Prishvin answered when interviewed on "the secret of his art." "One must put his question to life, one must live and stop asking the artist who is in love with the world: 'how could I, too, fall in love?'"

In The Chain of Kashchey, Prishvin tells how he became a lover of life and nature and how his road went "from loneliness to people." His hero Alpatov has heard in his childhood, which is described in masterly fashion, the popular Russian fairy tale about the evil sorcerer, deathless (and death-like) Kashchey, who cast his chain about the earth and tangled all human beings in it. When Alpatov grows up, he understands that Kashchey's chain is forged of injustice, greed, malice, slavery, and poverty. It prevents men from leading decent, happy lives—so the chain must be broken. In the same way that Tolstoy, as a child, had sought for the little green magic wand that would unite all men in the great Brotherhood of the Ant, Prishvin's young man searches for means to break the chain. He does not quite understand what will bring him closer to the great goal; he sympathizes with revolutionaries and is arrested, yet at the same time feels that political activity is not the whole answer. With experience he comes to understand that each creative effort, each enterprise, each worthwhile deed is a blow against the hateful chain.

Finally he gets absorbed in the practical task of draining swamps in the Moscow region and discovers the formula of "blessed work." To work for others is the highest achievement of mankind, since the fullest blossoming of the individual, of his creative qualities, of his vital functions, is possible only in an activity that fits into the general pattern of a common cause. The personal and the collective efforts merge into a creative one; creativeness means giving to others, it is an organic, natural part of life, as important as mating and child-bearing, and it strengthens the ties among human beings. It also brings man closer to the ever-producing, generating, breeding, blossoming nature. To do, to build, to work, to create, to give birth to somebody and something—these are the primeval laws of life, and only in fulfilling them does man attain satisfaction and inner peace. Thus Prishvin's religion of nature and creative activity assumes moral overtones that are not surprising in a writer whose ideological growth was determined in its early stage by Tolstoy, and, in succeeding stages, by ethical and revolutionary Populists. Later, Prishvin said that he admired Lenin because the great leader talked about the "commune" which will always be the goal of mankind. But although Prishvin did not accept Tolstoy's "non-resistance to evil by violence" and his ascetic and religious preaching, he could not support the Bolshevik practice of terror and compulsion, and remained outside the political struggle of his era. He avoided taking part in social activities, lived in the country according to his heart's desire, and his way of life was in perfect accord with his convictions.

The Chain of Kashchey consists of ten separate tales, called links. The first or Kurumushka link, dealing with the hero's childhood, is still very popular in the Soviet Union (as are Prishvin's various books for children). The other links are filled with charm and wisdom, particularly those describing Alpatov's university years in Germany and his adventurous search for a girl who had visited him once in a Russian prison, pretending to be his betrothed so that she could see him. He pursues this unknown girl even as a male bird flies for miles after its mate, but when he finally overtakes her he realizes that there is no real hope for him, and his first love turns into his first great disillusionment. Alpatov is crushed and desperate, yet he is strong enough to sense that this is only the beginning in his long pursuit of happiness, and that passion and frustration, ecstasy and bitterness are still awaiting him on this marvelous and cruel earth.

This ending is, however, by no means sad or depressing. Prishvin's acceptance of life is unlimited and his optimism is never marred by melancholy. He does not complain about the brevity of earthly existence or the frailty of human illusions. His serenity in the face of death matches his consecration of vital instincts. His is not the primitive, biological optimism of brawn and bravado; he hails all the manifestations of being and the exuberance of the life force, but he also asserts the priority of an enlightened conscience that strives to unite reason and instinct, wisdom and intuition, man and nature. In one of his most meaningful books, Crane's Birthplace, Prishvin wrote: "The world could be saved not by humanism, which degenerates into man's boasting about his civilization being superior to life, but by a harmonious accord of conscience and of creativeness of life through a single act of wedlock." To what extent this view expresses the mentality of an agricultural country is debatable. Some critics, at any rate, regard Prishvin as a typical representative of the peasant way of thinking. But even those, who find him old-fashioned and aloof from the issues of the day, concur in acknowledging "the deeply national characteristics of his writing." His whole outlook is so very Russian, his stories and fairy-tales are so akin to folklore, his descriptions convey so strongly the smell of Russian fields and forests, and he gives his reader such a perfect image of the country's vastness and its inexhaustible vitality, that he must be ranked as high as his teachers Leskov and Remizov and be considered a worthy follower of Tolstoy.

In turn he became the head of a literary group. Several writers, such as Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov (b. 1892), author of Tales of the Motherland (1947), continued Prishvin's tradition and in their descriptions of the Russian landscape stressed the feeling of nature they inherited from their master. Others learned from him the art of the lyrical sketch, a genre that had and still has a tremendous vogue in Soviet literature. But they lacked Prishvin's "cosmic sense" and imitated only his technique. By stressing the proud role of man as conqueror and master of nature they betrayed the very essence of his philosophy. Much closer to Prishvin's spirit was Konstantin Paustovsky, but he overcame the influence of the master and achieved his own place in Soviet letters.